How Much is My Website Worth? The Complete Income Store List and Analysis

About Jon Gillham

My name is Jon Gillham I am a 33 year old, husband, father of 3 (all aged 4 and under), engineer and huge geek when it to comes to systematizing and outsourcing any business. With over 10 years in the online publisher/advertising space I try to provide my thoughts with the hope it helps people build their own business! More About Me

How Much is My Website Worth? The Complete Income Store List and Analysis

The purpose of this article is to provide a quick update on what has happened with the Income Store. Most importantly, I want to provide what I hope are some useful insights into the value of every site in the IncomeStore Portfolio. If you are needing to find out how much your website is worth I hope this article will provide enough information for you to be able to do that.

Hang on because we go deep… exploring the value
of each site, looking at the ECommerce portfolio and if there is any value
there.

Disclaimer(s)

Everything below is alleged by the
SEC and the receiver but not proven in court.

None of this is legal or financial
advice

My team with the help of several tools SpamZilla, ahrefs and SEMRush among others has done an analysis that looks at every income store website and estimated its current value.

The specific sites value and TONS of metrics for each domain is shown in the spreadsheet below…

Access the Spreadsheet: Download Here

With the latest news release from the receiver a lot of new information has come to light.

Feb 2020 Income Store Receivership Update:

The Receivers Initial report has provided a lot
of very digestible information. If you have not yet read it and are interested
in the topic you should!

Claim Your
Website or Roll the Dice on Liquidation?

One of the potentially most important items and
part of the reason for this post is that the receiver is proposing a solution
that will require each site partner to evaluate the value of their website and
decide if they want it.

“The Receiver will propose a hybrid claims process that permits investors to make a claim for the domain(s)/website(s) “assigned” to them in the Consulting Performance Agreement in exchange for releasing any claim against the Receivership Estate under certain parameters 5 and those investors who do not want their site could participate in a later distribution process from a pool of liquidated assets and recovered funds. The Receiver will make such proposal by separate motion on or before February 28, 2020. This expedited process will permit the Receiver to transfer and/or liquidate the remaining domains/websites in the next 90 to 120 days, preserving the Receivership assets required to maintain the domains and websites.”Page 8

For site partners faced with this decision I hope
this analysis will be of value in both determining the value of their site but
from a portfolio / game theory standpoint what others will likely choose
ultimately helping you make the most educated decision.

Claim or Don’t Claim Example:

The decision is easy if you have a site worth
more than what you invested however thinking through what the final value of
the portfolio/recovered assets will be once the winners (and others with decent
sites) choose to claim their website gets very tricky. You can’t simply take
the recoverable value divided by the total $’s owing investors since some of
the recoverable value is going to disappear as people choose to take their
websites. You don’t want to be the person that chose to not claim their website
but your website ends being the most valuable one left in the pool to be
liquidated. I hope the data shared in this post helps make a terrible situation
slightly better by having the data to make the decision.

Ponzi
Scheme?

One takeaway from the Receivers Initial Report
that is different from previous SEC communication is that it had terms of
“Ponzi like” and now the receiver explicitly calls it a Ponzi scheme mentioning
it 3 times in the report including the clear description of what happened
below.

Quote from the Receiver:

“The Receiver’s review of the books and records of the company confirm the SEC’s allegations that new investor funds and loans were used to pay the investors/”website partners”, not website revenue. For example, in 2018 website revenue was under $2m and website payout to investors was approximately $12.7m and likewise in 2019 website revenue was under $4m and website investor payout was $16.5m. In short, this was a Ponzi scheme.” Page 6

“TGC’s business depended on the use of new investors’ up-front payments (and perhaps loan Case: 1:19-cv-08454 Document #: 45 Filed: 01/30/20 Page 21 of 28 PageID #:678 22 proceeds) to cover its obligations to earlier investors much in the vain of a Ponzi scheme” Page 22

So where did some of the money go? According to
the receivers report several luxury items have been seized including the
following (stock images)…

Bare minimum expenses for maintaining the 562 sites all worth more than 100 is ($10/yr for the domain + $5/month hosting + 40k for 1 full time manager) is ~$80k/yr

Others have generated a higher number for the portfolio value but I struggle to get to those favourable numbers (no offense Richard 🙂 ).

INCOME STORE PORTFOLIO VALUE = $1.5M – $3.5M

Now what would the market tolerate if all ~200 sites with an estimated value of over 1k got dumped on the market in 90 days from Feb 28th as the receiver is suggesting? My assumption would be that despite there being insatiable demand for less expensive content sites (the leader in smaller content sites MotionInvest sells out <$10k sites in minutes with thousands on the waitlist!) the receiver would want to be efficient and move them in bulk at a significant discount.

Typically a fast site sale in the lower end of
the market will go for 1x-2x which could bring the valuation down as low as
under $1M!

Shopify ECommerce Portfolio Value = $0?

2.5M in E
Commerce Revenue in 2019 But the Sites are Completely Worthless? How…

There had been a lot of publicity about
IncomeStore shifting to ECommerce launching 400+ Shopify sites. I want to run
the list of 3k+ domains through a tool to tell me the tech they are each on and
then the organic traffic for the shopify portion of the portfolio (another
day). So why do I think they are worthless…

Inventory – based on the inventory list their ecommerce businesses are either exclusively dropshipping or dead (most have inventory numbers under 10).

Expenses are more than Revenue – The PnL does have $2.5M in Revenue in 2019 from Product Sales (assume 100% is ecommerce)…however there is also a few expense line items to note such as $3.4M in advertising, $2.7M in ecommerce fees to an ecommerce digital advertising agency and internal ecommerce fees of $1.7M. I don’t blame the digital advertising partner since their mandate was likely given to maximize revenue. If you weren’t keeping track it is AT LEAST $4.4M in confirmed ECommerce expenses which greatly outstrip the $2.5M in ECommerce Revenue!

My Theory – Based on the lengths they went to in order to focus on their priority (new investor money in the door) they used the paid traffic Shopify drop shipping model to generate big revenue numbers fast in order to help entice new money in. If you wanted to scale revenue numbers FAST and didn’t care about profitability then running facebook ads to a dropship shopify site would be the strategy I would recommend.

Destruction of Value Analysis

It would be great to have someone with a forensic
accounting background who also has content site experience to comment on the
PnL but here are the numbers that jump out to me:

These numbers are primarily pulled from Exhibit D which I have turned into a Google Sheet here if you want to get a copy.

I don’t swear on this blog but I don’t know an
appropriate alternative WTF!

66% of every dollar in or $88.6M
of value has been destroyed in what must be one of the most inefficient Ponzi
schemes ever.

Earlier – I said I doubted it started as a ponzi but Google updates in 2016 (or earlier) must have either forced them to close down or embrace a ponzi scheme and certainly it looks like they fully embraced it taking it a step further and operating not just in a situation to not be able to cover the 15% but running the existing portfolio in a money losing situation!

It also seems that meaningful recovery for site
partners will unfortunately not come from the value of the portfolio.

Other Take away From Analysis

How did they have THAT many people working there?

Salary & subcontractor expenses of $7.4M to manage a content site portfolio generating $1.24M in advertising revenue and a worthless ecommerce portfolio? This angers the operational geek in me the most, why did they need to burn money on an inefficient head count? Running a ponzi scheme is obviously worse but running a portfolio at these kind of losses just seems needlessly inefficient & unnecessary.

Year over Year Advertising Revenue declined despite an ever increasing amount of funds being raised! They must have slowed the acquisition engine. It would be interesting to see the % of investor money going into site acquisition vs repaying investors vs burning within an inefficient business vs going to the alleged masterminds year over year.

2017 – $2.7M

2018 – $1.0M

2019 – $1.2M

Number of Websites = 3000+ with only ~500 worth anything (several in the list are clearly incorrect such as udemy) – why did so many stay active?

$500k in charitable donations from IncomeStore in 2019 while the business was imploding?? This seems to be part of the Ponzi Scheme playbook that hurts charities as well according to this article at times requiring them to payback the donation even if it had already been spent.

IncomeStore Site by Site Analysis

As promised if you are a website partner with
IncomeStore and know which website is yours this table is meant to start
providing you some information on the value of your site.

This is of course not a perfect analysis but
should give you an idea if there is any value associated with the site.

3012 Domains!!! That is a lot of sites. My team
has been cranking away on this analysis.

In addition to the analysis I used the tool at
SpamZilla to help pull in a LOT of data for each domain.

List of
IncomeStore Domains and Their Value:

Access the Spreadsheet Here

My hope is that this sheet will be the most useful and updated list of sites with relevant information to help website partners.

Summary

It is a very unfortunate situation. The loss in
value and inefficiency of operation is astounding.

3000+ domains

$134M invested

~66% of every dollar invested
gone?

It has felt like a slow painful reveal over the
last 2 months from the IncomeStore announcing it was postponing website partner
payments (temporarily) to then the SEC raid to now seeing the extent of the
value destruction.

I hope for site partners sake that the picture is
not as bleak as the current data shows and that good news will be the next data
point.

If you would like to do any additional analysis on the sites that could be helpful to the website partners I would be happy to include that analysis in the spreadsheet for everyone to benefit from. Please reach out if you have anything to add to help website partners when evaluating their site.

If you are a website partner and have any questions I would be happy to try and help answer anything, please don’t hesitate to contact me and my team.

I am a 33 year old husband, father of 3, engineer and a huge fan of developing systems to build useful and profitable websites. The reason I build online businesses is to provide financial independence for my family and yours AND so I can spend time outside skiing and biking with my family.